Telephone answering devices and voice mail apparatuses have heretofore been on the market independently of each other, the telephone answering devices being used as terminal equipment for individual persons and the voice mail apparatuses being used also as message transfer apparatuses in the form of large-scale telephone answering devices.
Integrated circuits have been used in current telephone answering devices resulting in an extreme reduction in the recording time, and some telephone sets have storage capacities of only several messages. Even when a tape is used, a commercially available one-hour cassette tape is not satisfactory for receiving business orders from general customers. Furthermore, though the voice mail has the capacity for storing messages as long as up to 80 hours, the user finds it difficult to determine the messages of how many months old should be erased. That is, earlier messages have been erased even if they were regarded to be necessary. Thus, these two apparatuses have their own problems.